A survey automatic text summarization

Abstract

The increasing availability of online information has necessitated intensive research in the area of automatic text summarization within the Natural Lan- guage Processing (NLP) community. Over the past half a century, the prob- lem has been addressed from many different perspectives, in varying domains and using various paradigms. This survey intends to investigate some of the most relevant approaches both in the areas of single-document and multiple- document summarization, giving special emphasis to empirical methods and extractive techniques. Some promising approaches that concentrate on specific details of the summarization problem are also discussed. Special attention is devoted to automatic evaluation of summarization systems, as future research on summarization is strongly dependent on progress in this area.